Bret
Stephens
Yes, Woke
1.0 Was Crazy. Now Where’s the Accountability?
Aug. 18,
2026
Opinion
Columnist
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/opinion/woke-liberals-restitution.html
It’s all
but official.
“Woke 1.0
was crazy,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said this month, quoting a far-left New
York City councilman. Given the congresswoman’s own record — she previously insisted that some groups
“have no choice but to riot,” called for defunding the police and “prison
abolition” and used the demeaning term “menstruating person” to describe a
woman — the crazy that she speaks of was also her own.
Good for
A.O.C. for acknowledging mistakes. Now can we have some accountability for the
vast damage that Woke 1.0 did, not to mention the damage that Woke 2.0
continues to do?
Wokeness,
as it commonly came to be known at the start of this decade, wasn’t just an
Orwellian linguistic fad or a tedious set of corporate training sessions in
cultural sensitivity or wacky policy ideas about addressing racial and
socioeconomic inequities. As it was experienced by those on the wrong end of
it, it was a system of enforced ideological conformity, policed by social
bullying and institutional coercion (or cravenness), which damaged and
sometimes even ended reputations, careers and at least one man’s life.
Restitution,
if only in the form of honest contrition and perhaps even a public apology, is
in order.
Restitution,
for instance, for Stan Wischnowski, the top editor of The Philadelphia
Inquirer, who in 2020 had to resign
from his job and issue a groveling apology for the sin of running an
article by the paper’s architecture critic with the headline “Buildings Matter,
Too.” Restitution for Mike Pesca, the host of a popular podcast, “The Gist,”
who was suspended
indefinitely from his job at Slate for making a case, in an
interoffice back and forth, that it may sometimes be permissible for a
non-Black person to quote a racial slur in narrow contexts. Restitution, yes,
for James Bennet, a former editor of The Times’s Opinion section, who was
forced from his job after the publication of a controversial guest essay by Tom
Cotton, a Republican senator.
Restitution
for authors, like my friend Richard North Patterson, who has 16 New York Times best
sellers to his name. When he wrote a novel that dealt with racial
discrimination and had a Black woman as a leading (and wholly sympathetic)
character, roughly 20 major imprints rejected it, with several making it clear
it was because he was white. Restitution for every aspiring young fiction
writer with the misfortune of being white and male and therefore quietly but
efficiently cut out of the game of literary prizes and publication
opportunities. As Jacob Savage noted last year in Compact magazine, his
research found that at the time, “not a single white American man born after
1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker.”
Restitution,
also, in academia.
For Jason Kilborn, a University of Illinois, Chicago, law
professor, who was barred from campus and placed on administrative leave after
he had used the first letter of two slurs in his civil procedure exam, an
affront the Black Law Students Association described as “mental terrorism.”
For Ilya
Shapiro, a legal scholar about to start a position at Georgetown Law
School, who had to endure a 122-day university inquest for the crime of a
clumsy tweet betraying a conservative worldview. For Carole Hooven, who was railroaded out of Harvard after a TV
appearance in which she said that the terms “male” and “female” were
scientifically essential even as she insisted that “facts about biology”
shouldn’t “prevent us from treating people with respect.”
Restitution
for the hapless men who got caught up in a #MeToo maw that made no distinction
between Harvey Weinstein-style predation and fumbled romantic advances or
unsatisfying hookups. The comedian Aziz Ansari was the most notable victim of
this form
of public humiliation, but there are many others, without influence or deep
pockets, whose lives were permanently
scarred in situations where accusations alone were viewed as
sufficient to establish guilt and exact professional consequences.
Restitution,
not least, for the drive-by victims of Woke 1.0 — sometimes literally so.
Emmanuel Cafferty, an employee for San Diego Gas and Electric, was fired from his job when he was pictured with his arm
hanging out of the window with his fingers linked in what appeared to be an
“OK” gesture, which the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation
League have called a coded symbol of white supremacy. Mr. Cafferty, who is
Hispanic, insisted he had merely been cracking his knuckles.
Certain
readers of this column will be tempted to rejoin that all this is old history.
So is the Red Scare of the 1950s, but that’s no reason to forget about it.
Other readers may say that what President Trump and his allies are doing is
just as bad as Woke 1.0 or far worse. I’ve denounced them,
too, but that’s pure whataboutism.
If
liberals want to be serious about standing up for liberty, they have a
particular obligation to acknowledge and reject the illiberalism that swept so
much of the left in recent years. Any politics of moral certitude and
promiscuous demonization — whether it comes from MAGA on the right or wokeness
on the left — isn’t just unfit for a free society.
It’s
crazy.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário